A continuous development of food processing, such as processing of fish products is always on demand with the focus on for instance to increase utilization and value of products as well as meeting demands for quality after processing. When handling a large quantity of fresh food products, speed is of major importance.
In many cases the processing is done on land, which requires storing the fish at sea and during transport to the factory. In this case the time period from when a caught fish ends up on the deck of fishing ship and to the time the fish starts cooling process needs to be as short as possible as all handling and transport has effect on the quality of the fish.
WO 2014/174535 provides an improved method where whole fish is brought to an under-cooled state by super-chilling before processing. Freshly caught fish is gilled and gutted at a workstation and then each fish is individually transported to a screw blade tank filled with sea water to facilitate the bleeding of the fish and to prevent the meet to be coloured by the blood. During transport to the bleeding tank the fish passes image means to determine the size of the fish. In this manner the fish can be directed into three different lanes for rinsing and subsequently cooling to bring the fish to an undercooled state by a stepwise cooling process.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,702,295 discloses an apparatus for automatically positioning fish with respect to their plane of symmetry and for the periodic transfer of the fish to a fish processing machine is proposed. The apparatus uses a supply conveyor in the form of a trough conveyor and a feed conveyor arranged below and perpendicular to the supply conveyor for feeding the fish into a processing machine. The feed conveyor includes a support conveyor with support elements onto which each fish is placed where the support elements protrude into the belly cavity. This is achieved by a holding element which is arranged between the supply conveyor and the feed conveyor and is controlled by a signal to open and release the temporarily held fish.
In order to efficiently pre-process, such as bleeding and gutting whole fish, and sorting fish prior to cooling it for storage until it is processed in factories on land, a large amount of fish needs to be handled in a short time to preserve freshness and quality of the fish. One of the drawbacks of pre-processing and delivering individual fish onto a processing line in a time efficient manner is the management of a time-efficient in-feeding mechanism and in some instances a horizontal drop of the fish onto the next apparatus of a processing line.